perverse effects of education

I have completed McCloskey’s remarkable book, and will continue to post short excerpts that caught my attention. Here is the first of several to follow.

Each of the book’s short chapters made me think, and some made me wish that I had written the words, or at least something similar. This excerpt is from chapter 43, the only chapter of the book that contains a formal model of economic growth. As McCloskey explains, on p. 411, “The ‘mathematics’ is merely a metaphorical language that economists understand, and which allows me to chat with them … without excessive confusion.”

[The effect of education] can be and often has been perverse, corrupting good bourgeois boys by educating them to believe that the bourgeoisie have no dignity at all, or corrupting good bourgeois girls to become state bureaucrats devoted to believing that bourgeois liberty is to be stamped out. Marx took a PhD degree in philosophy at Jena in 1841. The leader of the Shining Path Marxists in Peru was a professor of philosophy. A high percentage of the officers in Hitler’s SS had advanced degrees in the humanities. German engineers built the gas chambers. Excellent computer engineers enforce the Chinese censorship of the Internet.

This entry was posted
on Sunday, July 31st, 2016 at 09:47 and is filed under Education, History.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.